Lockdown #2
It did not take long for the lockdowns to proliferate. Having been introduced in NSW in an affirmation of the Cronulla pogrom - that is, as their professionalised version - by January 1st, they were invoked once again as indigenous kids took on police in the country town of Dubbo, after the latter tried to arrest suspected car thieves. The police were pelted with with stones, the kids burnt the police and the other car - in other words, like the members of the ‘Royal Lifesavers’ in Cronulla, the police came off second best, and then the lockdown was invoked. The Gordon Estate in Dubbo is much like the banlieues, de facto internment camp, if much smaller in scale. And, like the banlieues, there is the persistence of police harassment, impoverishment and racism. But, in this case, the Gordon Estate is particularly reminiscent of the missions and reserves. Lockdowns will be the mechanism of control for some time it seems.
Gripe: let’s not forget it was the Labor Party that both introduced these laws in NSW, from whence the whole idea of lockdowns originated - of course, this being a continuation of their historical attachment to the ‘White Australia’ policy and their more recent introduction of the regime of migrant internment camps. If I hear one more nostalgic ode from Anglo-Celts about the Labor Party, I will upchuck.
Also, I’m reading William Walter’s “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics”, which takes as it’s initial point of discussion recent changes to migration policy in the UK. It’s worth reading, but I’m not convinced that such a clean distinction might be drawn between the political-economic complex of the oikos and a politics of the domos (the home) as he argues. Particularly given that this argument is made so as to be able to construct a version of citizenship (and rights and security) that, having somehow dispensed with a domopolitical cast, is then - again, somehow - no longer disposed toward migration controls. I am unpersuaded.
Having said that, he opens with a quote from Procacci’s “Social economy and the government of poverty” (in The Foucault Effect), which seems both pertinent and reminds me I should read it again.
Pauperism is mobility: against the need for territorial sedantarization, for fixed concentrations of population, it personifies the residue of a more fluid, elusive sociality, impossible either to control or utilize: vagabondage, order’s itinerant nightmare, becomes the archetype of disorder and the antisocial: ‘the vagabond, the original type of all the forces of evil, is found wherever illegal or criminal activities go on: he is their born artisan’.
Perhaps the ‘government of poverty’ might also be discussed alongside the ‘government of land and labour’, not just the vagabond, then, but also the convict, the slave and the wage, the durations of indenture and confinement and, not least, terra nullius.
There is a striped tapir at the Dubbo zoo called Tiago. Fact. He earns more than me. Also fact.
Ghost of the Machine [January 4, 2006 @ 6:15 pm]
But how does the tapir get paid?
The oikos has animal husbandry. Whereas the domicile has, I suppose, pets. Maybe zoo is a better paradigm, the whole colonial-show-breeding program-enclosure axis.
s0metim3s [January 4, 2006 @ 9:53 pm]
William’s dissertation was on the government of unemployment, by the way. I’ve been meaning to read his “Some Critical Notes on ‘Governance’” in Studies in Political Economy 73, but haven’t gotten around to doing so. He also recently edited a volume on governmentality and international relations — I think he calls is “global governmentality”. Wendy Larner and Barry Hindess, among others, have papers in it.
Speaking of lockdowns: the banlieues are, to the best of my knowledge, still in a state of emergency. And, more locally, the government of Ontario wants to formalize its extra-legal powers in an emergency with a bill entitled Emergency Action and Civil Protection Act.
Craig [January 6, 2006 @ 2:18 am]
In case you haven’t seen it yet, the following is a discussion of the recent ‘French events’ taken from a Theorie Communiste discussion list:
http://anti-politics.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1012
http://meeting.senonevero.net/article.php3?id_article=78
Benjamin
benjamin rosenzweig [January 18, 2006 @ 10:39 am]
Thanks. The TC article makes a number of good points.
The discussion on the anti-politics forum around these event of late has been kind of frustrating - for a bunch of people who are sometimes inclined to fetishise rioting, the response to the retaliatory riots in Sydney (the ones after Cronulla) lacked even the minimal suggestion of post-arrest support that was expressed after, say, Macquarie Fields. As in France, it’s not simply that there’s a yawning gap between the Left (including the ultra-left) and the rioters, but an affective chasm.
s0metim3s [January 18, 2006 @ 11:22 am]